The day Agatha Christie disappeared
It could be a cold evening like any other, except that it wasn't
Yes, I have talked about Agatha Christie in this newsletter before, but I can't stop marveling over the fact that her books have sold more than 2 billion copies worldwide. As an author myself, I'm aware of how much work, dedication, and creativity it takes to create a book - let alone a successful one. With her 66 detective novels and 14 short story collections, Agatha was able to do this brilliantly - like literally no one else. It's not without reason that she is listed in the Guinness World Records as the best-selling fiction writer of all time.
Christie's books are full of unsolved puzzles and intriguing details, but I don’t think she could have predicted that one day she would become the major player in a story that resembles, in a very unsettling way, some of her most enigmatic novels. But this time, it was she who disappeared.
It could be a cold evening like any other, except that it wasn't. Shortly after 9:30pm on Friday, December 3 1926, Agatha Christie, then 36 years old and not yet established as the worldwide celebrity she would later become, kissed her sleeping daughter goodnight, climbed into her car and drove off to an unknown destination. Surrey Police discovered the vehicle the next morning, partially buried in shrubs near Newlands Corner in Guildford, Surrey. The sight was reminiscent of a car accident. A coat and a suitcase were discovered in the back seat, but the driver was nowhere to be seen.
Agatha Christie is one of the 200 women featured in my new book, A Woman’s World. If you enjoy my work, please consider pre-ordering the book via this link. Thank you!
Some time before all that happened, Agatha's husband, Col. Archibald Christie, had embarked on an affair with his 25 year old secretary Nancy Neale - something that he had recently confessed to his wife. As soon as news of Christie's disappearance became public, with police considering different possibilities and launching a nationwide searching operation that involved over a thousand police officers, 15,000 members of the public and even Agatha's dog, the couple fell under suspicion (nothing explicit against them was ever found).
Also worthy of attention is the fact that this was the first time in the UK that airplanes were employed as part of a search effort.
Agatha's story made the headlines on both sides of the Atlantic. For days, police searched everywhere they could. A lake known as the Silent Pool, located about half a mile from where the car was found, was dredged to rule out the chance that Agatha had met the same fate of one of her characters. The same was done with five other ponds around that region. Even Sir Arthur Conan Doyle - yes, that guy who created Sherlock Holmes - tried to help, taking one of Agatha's gloves to a clairvoyant in the hopes that she could feel the energy in them and finally solve the mystery. That, unfortunately, didn't help.
Conspiracy theories were running rife, with some people even assuming that the whole thing was nothing more than a publicity stunt. Another rumor claimed that Christie had left a sealed envelope behind, which was "to be opened only if her body is found".
The Times reported on December 10 that detectives "are now said to be of the opinion that it is a case of suicide".
What the hell actually happened?
After abandoning her automobile, Agatha took a train to Harrogate, Yorkshire. She checked in at the Old Swan Hotel under the name Theresa Neele, with nearly no luggage, telling people that she was South African. Finally, on 14 December, eleven days after her went missing, someone recognized her at the hotel and called the police. Archie travelled with them to Yorkshire, but was not recognized by his wife when he approached her. “She does not know who she is … she has suffered from the most complete loss of memory.”
Agatha was suffering from memory loss, therefore was unable to recount what happened in the preceding 11 days, or even explain why she ran away. Andrew Norman, her biographer, believes that she was in a ‘fugue’ state caused by depression (her mother had passed away, and news of her husband's infidelity, with whom she had been married for almost 12 years, might have been the final straw). He also said that "her adoption of a new personality...and her failure to recognize herself in newspaper photographs were signs that she had fallen into psychogenic amnesia.”
Christie's only declaration about the incident didn't offer anything helpful to solve the puzzle:
“For 24 hours I wandered in a dream, and then found myself in Harrogate as a well-contented and perfectly happy woman who believed she had just come from South Africa.”
The daughter of one of her friends declared years later: "But she had signed the guests' register in the name Neele - the surname of her husband's lover. It was carefully orchestrated.”
Agatha and Archie were welcomed by hundreds of people at London's King Cross Station upon their return, but went their separate ways 15 months later, when Christie filed for divorce. She remarried two years after that, and so did her husband: his ex-mistress, Miss Neele, was now his wife.
Christie rarely spoke about the dramatic incident in the years that followed, except for an interview with the Daily Mail in 1928.
“I left home that night in a state of high nervous strain with the intention of doing something desperate. When I reached a point on the road which I thought was near a quarry, I turned the car off the road...I left the wheel and let the car run. The car struck something with a jerk and pulled up suddenly. I was flung against the steering wheel, and my head hit something. Up to this moment, I was Mrs. Christie.”
The matter was never discussed in public again - not even in her autobiography which was published posthumously in 1977. One of her friends said, “It was the unspoken subject. Agatha refused to talk about it. To anyone. It was a real no-go.” During interviews or when questioned by the police, Archie wasn't of much help either.
With a vast amount of unanswered questions, her disappearance remain a mystery unsolved.
What do you think happened to her?
"Everything must be taken into account. If the fact will not fit the theory - let the theory go. You gave too much rein to your imagination. Imagination is a good servant, and a bad master. The simplest explanation is always the most likely."
- 'The Mysterious Affair At Styles', 1920.
Agatha Christie is one of the 200 women featured in my new book, A Woman’s World. If you enjoy my work, please consider pre-ordering the book via this link. Thank you!
Yearning to gain a smattering of excitement in her life......being famous in its own right really isn't that much fun.